V0ldek

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The Player of Games in which a smart nerd like themselves get recruited as an agent to bring down an empire a bit like our own by being really really good at games.

I'm sorry, I have no idea what this book is, but calling it "The Player of Games" is so funny to me.

adjust fedora I am not a gamer, I am A Player of Games

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago

Chat-GPT is more powerful than anyone on earth (if you squint)

xD

No sorry, let me rephrase,

Lol, lmao

How do you even grace this with a response. Shut your eyes and loudly sing "lalalala I can't hear you"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago

Just the usual stuff religions have to do to maintain the façade, "this is all true but gee oh golly do NOT live your life as if it was because the obvious logical conclusions it leads to end in terrorism"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 23 hours ago

You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts”.

This, coming from LW, just has to be satire. There's no way to be this self-unaware and still remember to eat regularly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Not doing your due dilligence during recruitment is stupid, but exploiting that is still unethical, unless you can make a case for all of those companies being evil.

Like if he directly scammed idk just OpenAI, Palantir, and Amazon then sure, he can't possibly use that money for any worse purposes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Ah ok, I'm aware of what this is, just never heard "work trial" used.

In my head it sounded like a free demo of how insufferable your new job is going to be

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

it was a bit of squeeze to add even Gemma3n:e2b onto it

statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

This is so funny, I don't think I've seen this before

Like imagine a cryptobro circa 2020 being like "no, we're not early, this is actually the honeymoon phase and it'll just get worse"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

My immediate gut reaction to a rule as general as this is that there's fat chance it's universally applicable, there will always be cases where active would be clunky.

Like I can't imagine an RPG protagonist exclaiming that "Someone trapped this chest!" instead of the 100% more natural "This chest was trapped!"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This article is wild already, on the first page there's this quote

‘Do not use the passive voice when such use makes a statement clumsy and wordy. . . Do not, by using the passive voice, leave the agent of the verb vaguely indicated, when the agent should be clearly identified.’ [Edwin Woolley, Handbook of Composition, 1907, p. 20]

Emphasis mine on... a clear usage of the passive! In active this would have to be "when you should clearly identify the agent" or something of the like, the fuck, how hard is it to not expose your whole ass like this mate

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (21 children)

Wait what, TIL there was/is a crusade against... the passive fucking voice?

Some people just need to invent problems for their life to feel meaningful, don't they

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

so businesses and employees who get real value out of the stuff.

I have really bad news about what percentage that would be

 

This is a nice post, but it has such an annoying sentence right in the intro:

At the time I saw the press coverage, I didn’t bother to click on the actual preprint and read the work. The results seemed unsurprising: when researchers were given access to AI tools, they became more productive. That sounds reasonable and expected.

What? What about it sounds reasonable? What about it sounds expected given all we know about AI??

I see this all the time. Why do otherwise skeptical voices always have the need to put in a weakening statement like this. "For sure, there are some legitimate uses of AI" or "Of course, I'm not claiming AI is useless" like why are you not claiming that. You probably should be claiming that. All of this garbage is useless until proven otherwise! "AI does not increase productivity" is the null hypothesis! It's the only correct skeptical position! Why do you seem to need to extend benefit of the doubt here, like seriously, I cannot explain this in any way.

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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